Day one, gaffe one. Even before he officially signed on as the new London Mayor on Saturday 3 May, Boris Johnson had managed to confuse Norman Foster with Richard Rogers.

Stumbling up to the podium, he mistakenly praised Rogers for designing the Greater London Authority HQ in Southwark.

But at least he noticed the architecture. In urban design terms the Conservative candidate has a lot to live up to when compared with his predecessor Ken Livingstone, who commissioned the London Plan and launched the 100 Public Spaces drive. Islington-based architect Chris Roche says Livingstone has ‘done more for London, and for architecture, than any other politician in recent history’.

Eight Cornell architecture students in an Arch 501 studio received real-world experience this semester, working on a new community music center to be built in Valencia, Spain. Students visited the site over spring break and met with architects in Valencia.

“We wanted to share all of our doubts and our concerns professionally with the students, with a real site, real conditions and the environment of what the project would be,” said Antón García-Abril, principal architect of Ensamble Studio in Madrid (http://www.ensamble.info), who taught the studio with colleague Débora Mesa Molina. “We’re working with the real needs of the city of Valencia. Reality in urbanism and architecture is so strong that we don’t need to create any fiction around it.”

URBAN regeneration specialist Urban Splash has picked up the Best Residential Marketing Campaign award for its Saxton development in Leeds at this year’s Property Marketing Awards.

Urban Splash accepted the award at a ceremony organised by trade magazine Estates Gazette in partnership with The Chartered Surveyors Company in London. The award recognises the innovative marketing campaign employed by the company to raise awareness of the Urban Splash brand in Leeds and to promote Saxton, its first development in the city during the run up to the first public sales launch.

Although the country’s infrastructure is already top class, infrastructure development will continue to be a priority in the government’s agenda of nation building, said Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.

“It is the Government’s responsibility to prepare the necessary infrastructure to be a catalyst for greater development, without which we cannot attract foreign investors and will see bottlenecks in our economic progress,” he said.

He also said that the Government could not plan infrastructure with expectations of getting high returns, as fees could not be charged for all projects.

From 1991 when Vision 2020 was first mooted until the end of last year, the Government had spent nearly RM100bil for infrastructure development, he said, adding that during the same period a total of 104,112km of roads and bridges had been successfully constructed nationwide.